#G11

If you’re a firearms enthusiast (as it’s likely that most people reading TFB are), you probably have a list of guns you want. Unless you’re one of the fortunate few to have an arsenal rivaling Heckler and Koch‘s Gray Room, the Rock Island Arsenal Museum, the NRA’s Whittington Center, or this guy that Nick met at a match several years ago, budget and availability are often limiting factors for new gun purchases. Of course, some guns are harder to get than others. Manufacturing runs and timeframes, frustrating legislation, importation challenges, the ravages of time, and a host of other factors can have a significant effect on the availability, accessibility, and price of various guns. The hardest pieces to procure are sometimes referred to as “unobtanium guns”, with the term being a sort of colloquial reference to these firearms’ difficulty (or sometimes impossibility) for us to acquire. Today we’ll explore a handful of the unobtanium weapons on my personal wish list, by no means comprehensive and in no particular order. I’m pretty sure that more than a few of you will find some commonality between my list and yours.

No, the Heckler & Koch G11 was never field tested on Venus but it kind of looks like it. This is an old picture of G11s with the German Gebirgsjäger (Mountain Rangers), to remind us of what things could have been.

The Heckler & Koch G11 is probably the most famous and recognized non-production rifle ever.

When we think of Heckler & Koch in the 1980s we think of the famous G11, the iconic HK MP5 and the stylish P7 pistol. One rifle we don’t tend to think of is the G41, a 5.56x45mm chambered rifle designed to meet NATO’s new requirements. HK hoped the new rifle would be a hit with NATO countries looking to make the transition from 7.62x51mm to 5.56x45mm. Their hopes, however, were dashed and sales proved to be sluggish leading to the G41 to be one of HK’s lesser-known offerings and the company’s last roller-delayed blowback infantry rifle.

A couple of months ago I had the chance to field strip a Heckler & Koch G11, the caseless ammunition-firing assault rifle. There are few experimental weapons that have cultivated myth and reputation like Heckler & Koch’s G11 and it was a privilege to take a look inside one.

Recently on The Firearm Blog we talked about one of the great might-have-beens, the German caseless G11 rifle developed by Heckler & Koch during the 1970s and 1980s. Today we have a video from 1990 filmed at Aberdeen Proving Grounds of a demonstration of the G11K2 on the firing range.

In the world of “might-have-been” small arms, a world of .276 Garands and NATO-standard EM-2s, none flew so high nor fell so far as the Heckler & Koch G11 caseless hyperburst assault rifle. Designed to out-match any contemporary small arm in a Cold War shootout across Central Europe, the G11 combined the aesthetics of a scifi plasma rifle with complexity of a Swiss watch. The result was a bullpup caseless wunderwaffe with a 2,000 round per minute hyperburst setting, and a price tag that, as the joke goes, compared unfavorably with reconstructing East Germany.

It is with a heavy heart that we at TFB bring news of the death of a true industry great: Jim Schatz has died. Jim’s career in the industry spanned four decades, and he served as a paratrooper (11B) with the 82nd Airborne, a shooter and instructor with the Army Marksmanship Unit, and most famously as an officer with Heckler & Koch. Through his time at H&K, he became known as the guru of all things HK, and many times he was recommended to me as the “go-to” personality whenever my research intersected with that company (which was often).

The history of modern small arms is in part so fascinating because of how many firearms have been developed even in obscure circumstances, and how many of those obscure small arms still exist in museums and private collections around the world. Even though I make learning about obscure modern small arms my hobby, I am continually surprised by the new and unique weapons I uncover both on the Internet and in real-life excursions to some of the aforementioned collections.

One of our readers that goes by the name ‘ theyoyomaster‘ emailed us a collection of new photos taken in Heckler & Koch’s Grey Room. Nathaniel F. has been posting some high-quality photos of some of the more rare and interesting firearms on the conference room walls, but the photos sent over by ‘theyoyomaster’ show some more common, but still interesting firearms.

In May of this year, I got the rare opportunity to travel to Heckler & Koch’s headquarters in Ashburn, VA, to take a look at some of the experimental and prototype firearms they have located there in their famous “Grey Room”. It wouldn’t be worth as much for me to just tell you about it and to snap a few foggy cell phone pictures, though, so I brought along Othais of C&Rsenal to help me take high resolution light box photos of these unique and rare firearms.

In May of this year, I got the rare opportunity to travel to Heckler & Koch’s headquarters in Ashburn, VA, to take a look at some of the experimental and prototype firearms they have located there in their famous “Grey Room”. It wouldn’t be worth as much for me to just tell you about it and to snap a few foggy cell phone pictures, though, so I brought along Othais of C&Rsenal to help me take high resolution light box photos of these unique and rare firearms.

It’s often said that small arms technology has plateaued; that development of better kinds of weapons is essentially unfeasible for the moment, and that non-optic related small arms technology had pretty much reached its peak by 1965. It would be very difficult to cover the state of the art and how to improve it in-depth, so I won’t. Instead I want to take only a moment of our readers time to explore an often-missed element of firearms technology that is the key piece in understanding the technology “plateau” and how to end it.

I remember seeing it in the movie Demolition Man, being wielded by Wesley Snipes. The real thing is just as fantastic as the movie portrayed.